Mom

"She passed at 7:15," the hospice nurse told us as we, my sisters and I, arrived that morning five years ago, at my mother's apartment.  We had been called a week ago to come "now" because she didn't have much longer to live.  My mother, so opinionated, precise, funny was gone, just as they had said she would.  And typical to her style, she had died on schedule the day before we were leaving.

"You might want to go in separately and spend a little time with her," the nurse suggested.  It was hard to imagine my mom not criticizing the nurse because she smoked, making jokes, cracking us up with her humor.  My sister Lynn did not want to go in, prefering to remember her as she was in life.

I decided to go into her room.  I held her cold limp hand.  The blue veins stood out under the translucent  skin, but she was still my mom.  "You were a wonderful mother," I said,  something that sounded so trite but was in fact very true.  "You did so much for me.  I am a musician because of your love of music spreading to us girls."  (My sister Amy is a public school music teacher in Pasadena.  My sister Lynn played oboe through high school and has handed down the love of music to her daughters.)  "You always had advice to give, most of it very wise and useful.  And I loved that you loved polar bears."  My mother worried about polar bears, how their habitat was vanishing.  But in her last week, she told us she didn't need to worry about them anymore.  Let someone else do that now.  Maybe that is how paradise would be for my mother, happy with the life she had lived.